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I remember having an amber monitor. The resolution was significantly better, so we put up with the lack of color.
by rootusrootus 4y ago
I remember having an amber monitor. The resolution was significantly better, so we put up with the lack of color.
- bombcar 4y agoHercules graphics was the shizzznit back in the day of cga
- rootusrootus 4y agoSure was. 720x348 if my memory isn't failing me (don't ask why I can remember such useless numbers for decades). And twice as many text columns. For a teenager into coding, it was heavenly.
- actionfromafar 4y agoI hooked a Hercules card and monitor up to my 486 with Linux and tinkered around. It was kind of cool to be able to draw graphics on a second amber (or was it green) monitor, but I never could get 2 terminals to work. Just writing directly in Hercules memory from root. If I recall correctly, one could also debug a DOS programs and print stuff on the Hercules while doing graphical or text UI on the regular VGA.
- bombcar 4y agoYeah for pure pixels it was up near VGA for games like Simcity and wasn’t really surpassed until we got to SVGA.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoI used one(ISA) as text console next to a PCI-card, next to an AGP-Card around 1996, or so. True triple head setup! With BIOS boot set to Hercules as primary. Then when XFree86 got up, the other screens lit up, too. Worked under BSD & Linux :-)
- bombcar 4y agoYeah, the different memory area worked even back in the CGA-EGA-VGA days - you could run some software that took advantage of it even in DOS - debuggers that showed debugging info on the Hercules and the "main screen" on the color.
- VLM 4y agoFinancially you always got two to four times the resolution with B/W or single colored phosphor than with color monitors. They were also less fuzzy. Its not just more pixels but less fuzz.